Great Adaptations

Flyers legend Bob Clarke was man enough to admit the game had passed him by.

by Brian Hickey

Three years ago, as the puck was about to drop on the final season of the old-time, rugby-scrum-in-front-of-the-net NHL, I spent two months milling about the Flyers' practice facility over in Jersey. The writer/hockey fan in me had set out to answer one simple question: After all these years, do we really know Bob Clarke?

By the time I was done, I thought the answer was yes. More than a busted-smile, Stanley Cup-hoisting legend, he was a man's man who found his niche, couldn't give two shits about what people (especially the media) thought of him and wouldn't leave the sport which made him famous until the day he got fired — or died.

It was an easy conclusion to reach, considering at one point, in an office overlooking the practice rink, Clarke told me, "I've heard that people think I should stop and smell the roses, maybe travel or something. Well, I'm not really a sightseer. I'm not ready to go to Vermont and watch the leaves change colors. The day that happens is the day they should push me right off the Walt Whitman."

Well, let the record reflect that the day that happened was Oct. 22, 2006.

It was a Sunday on which, coincidentally, police found themselves peering down from the Walt Whitman for someone who jumped to his apparent death. And don't think Clarke didn't briefly come to mind the moment after I saw the "Search Continues for Whitman Bridge Jumper" headline. After all, hockey is a sport of violence and, Clarke, one of the dirtiest players ever, has long been considered a man of his word.

Actually, make that hockey was a sport of violence, because so much has changed since that 2003 profile. After general manager Clarke's squad came within one game of reaching the finals that season, the fiscally desperate league shut down for a year. When it reopened, everything down to the rule book had changed dramatically.

It was a new NHL, one in which an old head like Clarke was unequipped to succeed. Though he played a major role in half of the city's sporting championships during my lifetime, the sport passed him by. Being the stand-up guy I found him to be, he apparently realized that he had to walk away for the betterment of the organ-i-zation since, in his own words, "I wasn't doing the right job."

It was a class move, even if some have unfairly questioned whether he was using burnout as a weak excuse to sneak away as the team got off to a horrific 1-6-1 start that also cost coach Ken Hitchcock his job.

But while it's easy to relegate the story to the sports pages, Clarke's out-of-nowhere resignation speaks to so much more than hockey. It's emblematic of the world as a whole. The times, it seems, are changing more rapidly than at any point since the Industrial Revolution, which means a whole slew of people have gotten left behind.

Think about what it's like to be a travel agent in the age of Expedia. A factory worker in the time of outsourcing. A television-advertising exec after the advent of TiVo. An Army infantryman on a battlefield where the enemy doesn't wear an identifiable uniform.

Today, everybody from auto-plant workers to — yes — journalists faces the same challenges that forced Clarke to decide whether to dramatically change his ways and stay in the game or step aside for the next generation and find a new path.

It takes a man's man —or woman's woman — to stare down the limitations brought on by external forces. For most of us, that's meant finding a way to translate your skills into the new marketplace (hello, Clog!). It's nothing more than today's variation of Only the Strong Survive.

Rather than adapting, Clarke chose to walk off into the sunset of his choosing. Well-off at 57 years old, nobody should begrudge him that.

Nor should we do anything but wish him well and hope the team brought in some new-school minds that'll return the team to greatness.

But once he decompresses and loses that pained, shocked expression, here's hoping the new Bob Clarke, the one who's earned the right to stop and smell the roses, realizes Vermont might not be all that bad a place to visit this time of year after all.

(hickey@citypaper.net)